I’m still working on getting things the way I want them here. So far so good. I need to make some catagories, and catagorize all my old postings. It’s kind of cool reading through some of these old entries from so long ago. Time flies!

I don’t really know why I haven’t updated this thing in a while. I never have been good at it. Any how. Things have been going pretty good. I’ve been busy with work, side projects, and life in general. Steph and I just got back from a short trip to Vegas. It was a nice getaway, and we got to meet up with some friends there. Unfortunately 2 of our other friends who were supposed to meet us there had to cancel at the last minute. So I’m just gonna have to bug the shit outta them to come visit us here in VA 😉 I finally got a new cell phone with a camera, so I setup a moblog on textamerica. Not much there yet, and I need to customize it a bit, but it serves it’s purpose.

Wow, this got pretty long

10 months after I got my car, I finally got the body kit for it last week! I had just about written it off, and was going to just get the dealer to credit me the cost, and it magically appeared while I had my car in for normal scheduled maintenance. I am so through dealing with that dealership, and now thankfully I have nothing tying me to them. I wrote up a 3 page complaint about them, that I am sending to Infiniti consumer affairs. Hopefully they will break a foot off in some asses over there, so no one else has to go through the crap that I did. A new Infiniti dealer opened up in Chantilly, which is about 10 minutes from my house, so I’m gonna start bringing my car there.

I finally got my ass into the dentist a few months ago. I have undergone three 4 hour procedures to try to fix all the mess that was my teeth. I don’t have the total, but it’s been 2 root canals (in 2 teeth next to one another), gum surgery above those 2 teeth, somewhere between 10 – 15 fillings, and a deep cleaning of my gums and teeth. I still have temporary crowns on the 2 root canaled teeth that I have to get replaced with the permanent porcelain crowns in a couple weeks. And since dental insurance sucks ass, I have paid several thousand dollars out of pocket for this after the $1500/yr dental insurance limit. Next year, I’ll start work on the more cosmetic stuff, like trying to get my bottom row aligned, and some bridgework. The moral of the story kids… Don’t ever put off going to the dentist for nearly 15 years!

In other news, I’m in the process of switching my phone lines over to Vonage, to get away from Verizon. I pay entirely too much money for phone lines that hardly get used. I’ll be saving about $35/mo after all is said and done. In the process, I’m also gonna switch my alarm system over to a broadband monitoring service, which will save close to another $20/mo. I know it’s not as reliable as a phone line, but in the end, who’s to say either is gonna work when it needs to? We fool ourselves into believing that it’s actually going to help when/if the time comes, when in reality in most cases help is too late anyway. As far as I’m concerned, as long as the siren sounds, the alarm has done it’s job. Everything else, is just a bonus that may help a bad situation.

We’ve been doing some work around the house, trying to make things more our own. It’s funny that we’ve been there just about 5 years, and we had hardly done anything to the place. Granted, we picked out a lot of the stuff in the build process, but there were always a lot of things we wanted to change, like paint. So far we have only done the kitchen, but we are slowly working through the rooms one by one. We are both into a lot of asian/indian stuff, so that has been the theme. It’s amazing how much some color, or artwork can change the way you feel when you are in a room. I’m gonna try and get the yard landscaped in the next month or so, since it’s all dirt again. Feng Shui I say!

India, (our rotti/shar-pei mix) has been having some “issues” that we are trying to work out. We’re trying some herbal (magnesium) treatments to see if it helps, along with task of trying to rid the environment of whatever “triggers” we can. If the herbal treatments don’t help, we’ll have to try prozac. I am not a fan of psychiatric medication of any kind, but if it helps to balance things out in her brain, then I’m all for it.

So I haven’t posted in a while. Been hella busy at work lately. I’ve been in Boston since Sunday for Linuxworld. It was cool, but I don’t think I’d even go for the whole week again. A couple of days would be good. Unfortunately, it seems I know too much, cuz most of the conferences/seminars I sat in on were old news. I guess that’s not really a bad thing though, is it?

I forgot how great Boston is. I love this city. The architecture is fantastic. The people are mostly cool. I wouldn’t mind having a house up here, though I wouldn’t wanna live here in the winter. It’s pretty fuckin cold. As usual, I walked entirely too much this week. The only time I’ve used any other form of transportation I’ve used was the cab I took to the hotel from the train station. I walked about 10 miles the other day around the city, after walking around the expo all day. Today I walked another 5 or so to/from the aquarium, and all around it. It was fun, but I wish Steph was here to see it. It’s too bad, cuz there’s no reason she couldn’t have come, since she’s hardly working this week with the office being remodled.

Other than the trip, not much has been goin on. I’m still waiting on my body kit for my car. They called me today to tell me that infiniti hasn’t even started shipping the parts out. That’s what I get for getting a car barely off the assembly line right?

I decided that we needed a real vacation, so I booked us a trip to Cancun next month for our anniversary. We’ll be staying in the same hotel we stayed at for our honeymoon. It will be nice to just relax for a week. Been a long time since we took a real vacation.

On the car front, I decided to go with the Infiniti. However, finding the exact one I want, on the east coast is a much bigger challenge than I anticipated. Apparently, Infiniti made the decision to send mostly AWD 05 G35 sedans to the notheast, because thats where the market demand is right now. And I would have to agree to an extent. I would get an AWD, if I didn’t just get the outback for Steph. That was one of the main reasons that we got that car. However, I don’t want to spend the extra money for an AWD car, that’s also gonna get even worse gas mileage than the already less than steller mileage on the RWD G35.

So I went to the dealer near me on Monday to try and get a deal setup for my car. It turns out that all they have is 5 05’s in stock, all AWD, and they wont be getting more until March! I try to get them to order me the car I want, or have it transferred. They try to sell me on an 04. I’m like screw you hippies! I’m out. So I start calling all of the infiniti dealers within a 150 mile radius to try and find the exact car I’m looking for. The dealer in Alexandria tells me that they have located the car in Miami, and can try and get it transferred for a fee. I’m like HELL YEAH! So I waited around there yesterday for a couple of hours waiting for the GSM in Miami to call the GSM in Alexandria to confirm that they will transfer the car. After several attempts to get ahold of him, the GSM at Alexandria tells me to just go home, and he’ll call me as soon as he hears from him today.

So keep your fingers crossed. If this falls through, the only other location they found that had the color/specs I want is in TX, which would cost a lot more to transfer. IF it does work out, I’ll go in today and give em a deposit and the car will go out on a flatbed today/tomorrow and should be here within 24 hours. The waiting is killing me!

I’ve been having a ton of problems with my servers lately. It’s getting to the point where I am constantly proactively monitoring them, in addition to my automated monitoring which pages me when theres a problem. People can’t write secure code to save their lives, so I’m in a battle trying to keep the script kiddiez off my hosting server. I keep trying to deploy a secure kernel patch that should help mitigate the problems, but I keep running into issues where certain necessary services wont start up properly. I have a maintenance window scheduled for tomorrow night to do some upgrades, so one way or another, I’m gonna make this shit work right. Otherwise, I’m gonna have to go through all of my customers code to find their shitty PHP upload script that is allowing the malicious code to get in.

On Friday, the company where I’m working my contract at, offered me a permanent position for substantially more money, and a shit ton of benefits. I of course accepted it, so as of Jan 3rd, I will be a permanent employee here.

In other news, I made the decision to get a new car earlier this year depending on finances. Since all is good on that front, I could have a new car as earlier as this week! I took my car over to carmax to get a quote, and they gave me a quote just over blue book, with all my after market parts still installed. I’m gonna try and get the dealer to match their quote, if not, I’ll just go sell it to carmax and cut the dealer a check.

I was all about the new Acura TL for the past year, but after test driving it, and the Infiniti G35, I am really leaning towards the G35. The TL has a few more bells and whistles inside, but the G35 has a lot more power, and tighter suspension. On top of that, I can get it fully loaded for a few grand less than the TL with the A-spec package, which is the only way I’d get the TL. So I’m going back to infiniti to drive the G35 again, and talk some numbers. If they give me what I want, I could drive out of there in a new car. Most likely I’ll hafta order my car though, so I may have to wait a week or two, but I’m so stoked! I love my teg, it’s been good to me, and I’ll miss it. But I’m getting older and I want something bigger that can still go fast.

Been a while since I updated this thing, so I thought I’d say hi. Not a whole lot has been happening as of late. Work has been cool. I am basically the resident linux ninja now, which is both good and bad. Obviously it’s good because I am needed. It’s also bad, because I am needed. Luckily we don’t deal with production equipment much, so most of our machines are not critical. The only times I have pressure to get stuff done ASAP, is when someone is trying to do a demo (which has kept me here 12 hours one day, and 15 another day). I don’t really mind though, cuz I enjoy what I do.

Steph & I went to Philly last weekend as a mini vacation. It was nice to spend more than a few hours there for once, and actually get to see the city. As usual, we walked A LOT. We have a problem using transportation on trips, and always end up walking miles and miles everyday. We took a tour on The Big Bus which was cool. It takes you all over town to the major attractions, with a guide who tells you about everything along the way. You can get on and off wherever you want throughout the day. It made it a lot easier to visit all the places we wanted to go in a single day. We stopped at the art museum, and the zoo. Both were cool, but overpriced in my opinion. I guess I’m just spoiled from living in the DC area. We stayed at an awesome hotel called sofitel. They are really big in Europe. There service was fantastic, and the hotel was beautiful.

Other than that, time is just flying by at an unbelievable pace. We finally bought some bikes, and have been trying to get out as much as possible. As soon as I get a rack for the car, we’ll start hitting the trails in the fall. I have been trying to make time to hang out with friends, but it’s been really hard to get together. I have zero interest in going out to clubs these days, which seems to be the same old meeting place. I think I need to have a party or something, to get everyone together.

I’ve been working at my new job for a week now, and It’s been pretty cool. I have finally gotten most of my shit setup, and I’m just waiting on a couple of little things to get done. I’ve spent most of this week setting up a PXE kickstart server for our labs. One of my ongoing projects is upgrading (reinstalling) an asston of legacy RH servers, as well as migrating others. So this was the first thing I wanted to get done, as it will save me lots of man hours. People pretty much leave me alone and let me work, so It’s a nice change. I have some summer hire sitting in my office right now, but hopefully she’ll be leaving soon, and I’ll have the entire office to myself. I don’t like having to turn lights on, and keep my music low for other people. At least she’s nice, and doesn’t bother me.

I’ve been working about 7-4 all week, and It’s been working well for me. I’d like to go in a little earlier, but so far it hasn’t really happened. It’s been nice to actually see Steph everyday, and having a full weekend together is awesome. We’re gonna buy some bikes soon, so we can go riding a lot in the fall. And if all goes as planned, we’re gonna take a weekend trip down to OBX around the end of the month or early next month.

I’m starting to ramble my random thoughts again, so I think it’s time to end this. How is everyone else?

So for the past month or so, I have been actively pursuing a new job. I love Rackspace, and they have been good to me, but I felt it was time for me to move on and put my talents to better use. I had been contacted by a few people about potential jobs, and my resume is all over the place. A couple of weeks ago, a recruiter contacted me about a Linux sysadmin position that I might be interested in. I gave them a call thinking that they were gonna offer me some windoze admin job with a little unix/linux. Instead, it turned out to be damn near exactly what I was looking for. We finally got an interview setup for yesterday afternoon, so I went in on my few hours of sleep for the week, and had a nice long 2 hour interview with some of the other admins, and the director. They were all awesome, and I wanted to stay and talk with them even longer. They told me they were in a hurry to fill the position, and would decide soon. I got home from work at about 8:30 this morning, and they called me at about 10:00 and said congratulations! I received and faxed back my offer, and sent off my resignation letter this morning.

I am beyond ecstatic! I have been extremely stressed out at work over the past couple months. The hours were really beginning to tear into my time with Steph. So I will finally be back on a “normal” schedule, get an ass-ton more money, and do what I’m actually good at. I can’t wait to start!

So last night was brutal. Sales got a bug up their asses cuz it was end of the month and they hadn’t sold shit all month, so they made up for it in 12 hours. I had 30 servers waiting for me when I got to work last night. By the time I left at almost 10 this morning, there were only 4 left. My team kickz ass!

So I came home, ate a bagel, and started working on some shit before I go to bed, and all of the sudden the interweb went *p00f*! I knew immediately that the cock bitez at BTN shut off my T1 early! Fuckerz! I was not fully prepared to switch over to the new network yet, so I had to make some quick changes to the new firewall, and got the important machines back online. I still have a shitload of rulez to add to the firewall, but I’m too fuckin tired, and there is really nothing important here anymore except my monitoring machine, a name server (which I now have a secondary offsite), and the mail server.

Well the inevitable happened. We lost power at around 11:00pm EST. My UPS’ at home lasted about 45 minutes, then went down with all the servers. The majority of VA is without power right now, and it’s not expected to be back anytime soon. We’ve been running on generators here since about 11:00pm. My datacenter engineer says that under our current load, we should be able to go at least a week without refueling our generators. That’s pretty fuckin impressive if you ask me. Now if I could figure out a way to run a long ass extension cord the couple of miles to my house 😉 Wanna see just how bad it is? Check out these links.